The film industry has traditionally employed analog media for recording content. Analog media, such as 35 mm film, decays over time. The decay over time results in the degradation of image and sound quality. Long term storage of film media has been a difficult to solve problem. The situation of long-term archival has been partially solved in the analog world, however, using color separated versions of the film, which are recombined at provide the complete rendering of the film.
For example, three color component reels: yellow, cyan and magenta (YCM) are produced and separately stored, and recombined into a single reel when reproduction is needed. This is only a partial solution because it does not provide long term archival for sound, and also because more and more feature scenes are shot using visual effects techniques, causing the film to loose the key rendering information embedded in characters, like color and lighting parameters as add-ons to background plates mainly shot on negative film.
Therefore, a need exists for addressing long term degradation of film properties in image, sound and rendering information.